Space Weather Impacts, Mitigation and Forecasting · ever reaches the level of urgency of even an approaching, severe thunderstorm. Despite the fact that, since the 1990s, we have

Space Weather – Impacts, Mitigation and Forecasting

Dr. Sten Odenwald

National Institute for Aerospace

Introduction

Normal, terrestrial weather is a localized phenomenon that plays out within a volume of 4

billion cubic kilometers over scales from meters to thousands of kilometers, and times as

diverse as seconds to days. Whether you use the most humble technology found in primitive

villages in Bangladesh, or the most sophisticated computer technology deployed in Downtown

Manhattan, terrestrial weather can and does have dramatic impacts all across the human

spectrum. During 2011 alone, annual severe weather events cost humanity 2000 lives and

upwards of $37 billion dollars (Berkowitz, 2011). The public reaction to terrestrial weather is

intense, and visceral, with armies of meteorologists reporting daily disturbances around the

globe, and weather forecasting models that are decades-old and have improved in reliability.

In contrast to terrestrial weather and our methods of mitigating its impact, we have the

arena of space weather, which occurs within a volume spanned by our entire solar system, over

time scales from seconds to weeks and spatial scales from meters to billions of kilometers.

Unlike the impacts caused by terrestrial weather, space weather events on the human scale are

often much more subtle, and change with the particular technology being used. There are, for

example, no known space weather events in the public literature that have directly led to the

loss of human life. The public reaction to space weather events when announced, seldom if

ever reaches the level of urgency of even an approaching, severe thunderstorm. Despite the

fact that, since the 1990s, we have become more sophisticated about communicating to the

public about the potential impacts of severe space weather, these alerts are still only consumed

and taken seriously by a very narrow segment of the population with technology at risk; satellite

owners, power grid operators, airline pilots and the like. The historical record shows that in

virtually all instances, space weather events have only led to nuisance impacts; disrupted radio

communication; occasional short-term blackouts; and occasional satellite losses that were

quickly replaced. Yet, when translated into the 21st Century, these same impacts would have a

significantly larger impact in terms of the numbers of people affected. For instance, the Galaxy 4

satellite outage in 1998 deactivated 40 million pagers in North America for several hours.

Pagers at that time were heavily used by Doctors and patients for emergency surgeries, to

name only one type of direct impact. Numerically, and in terms of function, we are substantially

less tolerant of ‘outages’ today than at any time in the past history of space weather impacts.

In this chapter, I will review the various technologies and systems that have historically

proven susceptibilities to space weather, why they are susceptible, methods being used to

mitigate these risks, and how one might estimate their social impacts. I hope to demonstrate

that, although we have a firm understanding of why technologies are at risk from basic physics

considerations, we are still a long ways from making the case that extraordinary means need to

be exerted to improve our current levels of reliability. One of the reasons for this is that we have

been living through a relatively moderate period of solar activity spanning the majority of the

Space Age. Without a major ‘Hurricane Katrina’ event in space weather, perhaps akin to the

1859 Superstorm, there is not much public outcry, commercial foresight, or political will, to

significantly improve the current preparedness situation. Moreover, the progress of technology

has been so rapid since the beginning of the Space Age in the late 1950s, that many of the

technologies that were most susceptible to space weather, such as telegraphy, compass

navigation, and short-wave communication, have largely vanished in the 21st Century, to be

replaced by substantially more secure consumer technologies.

1.0 Open-air Radio Communication

Although telegraphic communication was the dominant victim of solar geomagnetic

activity during the 1800s, by the mid-20th Century, virtually all telegraphic systems had been

replaced by land-lines carrying telephonic communications, or by the rapid rise of short-wave

broadcasting and submarine cables for trans-continental communication (Odenwald, 2010). At

its peak in ca 1989, over 130 million weekly listeners tuned-in to the BBC’s World Service. Once

the Cold War ended, short-wave broadcasting and listening went into decline. As Figure 1

shows, less than 1/3 of the stations on the air in 1970s are still operating. Compared to other

forms of communication (e.g. web-based programming) shortwave is very expensive in terms of

setting up a radio station, or providing operating costs to purchase megawatts of broadcasting

power. [Careless, 2010, 2011]. Nevertheless, by December 2011 an estimated 33% of the

human population had access to the Internet, and its vast network of formal and informal ‘news’

aggregators, including online versions of nearly all of the former shortwave broadcasting

stations.

Although shortwave broadcasting is a ghost of its former self, there are still a number of

functions that it continues to serve in the 21st Century. It is a back-up medium for ship to shore

radio, delivering state-supported propaganda to remote audiences, time signals (WWV),

encrypted diplomatic messaging, rebel-controlled, clandestine stations, and the mysterious

‘Numbers Stations’. There also continues to be a die-hard population of amateur radio ‘hams’

who continue to thrill at DXing a dwindling number of remote, low-power stations around the

world when the ionospheric conditions are optimal. Sometimes, these Ham operators serve as

the only communication resource for emergency operations. For example, during Hurricane

Katrina in 2005, over 700 ham operators formed networks with local emergency services, and

were the only medium for rapidly communicating life-saving messages. Despite the lack of

public interest or awareness of the modern shortwave band, its disruption could leave many

critical emergency services completely blind and unresponsive in a crisis.

Insert Figure 1 about here

Short wave broadcasting played such a key societal role during the first-half of the 20th

century that millions of people were intimately familiar with its quality, program scheduling,

and disruptions to this medium. Any disruption was carried as a Front Page story in even the

most prestigious newspapers such as the New York Times. Although shortwave stations were

routinely jammed by the then Soviet Union or Germany during World War II, these efforts

paled in comparison to the havoc wreaked by even a minor solar storm. Known as the

Dellinger Effect, a solar flare increases the ionization in the D and F Regions of the

ionosphere on the dayside of Earth, spanning the full sun-facing hemisphere. This absorbs

shortwave radiation but causes very low frequency (VLF) waves to be reflected. During the

four solar cycles that spanned the ‘Short Wave Era’ from 1920 to 1960, there were dozens of

flares that delivered radio blackouts, which regularly interfered with trans-Atlantic

communication; a major news and espionage flyway for information between Europe and

North America:

July 8, 1941 - Shortwave channels to Europe are affected [New York Times, p. 10]

September 19, 1941 - Major baseball game disrupted [New York Times, p. 25].

February 21, 1950 - Sun storm disrupts radio cable service [New York Times, p. 5

August 20, 1950 - Radio messages about Korean War interrupted. [New York Times, p. 5]

April 18, 1957 - World radio signals fade [New York Times, p. 25]

February 11, 1958 - Radio blackout cuts US off from rest of world. [New York Times, p. 62]

Although as we noted before, contemporary public contact with shortwave radio is nearly

zero, today there are some places where SW is still in limited use, and where the public in those

regions would be as conversant with SW fade-outs as the western world was in ca 1940. For

instance, China is expanding its SW broadcasting to remote populations across China who do

not as yet have access to other forms of communications networks. Even today, short wave

outages still make the news:

On August 9, 2011 a major solar flare caused fade-outs in the SW broadcasts of Radio

Netherlands World, but after an hour, broadcasting had returned to its normal clarity. Solar flare

disrupts RNW short wave reception [RNP, 2011]. This was the first major SW blackout in China

since the X7.9-class flare on January 21, 2005, which affected Beijing and surrounding eastern

population centers. [Xinhuanet, 2005]. On February 15, 2011 another large solar flare disrupted

southern Chinese SW broadcasting. The China Meteorological Administration reported an X2.2-

class flare at that time. [Xihuanet, 2011]. The January 23, 2012 M9-class solar flare disrupted

broadcasts on the 6 – 20 meters bands across North America, and severely affected the UHF

and VHF bands for a period of a few hours. [SWA, 2012]

1.1 Submarine Telecommunications Cables

The first copper-insulated, trans-Atlantic cable was deposited on the ocean floor in 1856

between Ireland and New Foundland, but because it was run at voltages that were too high, the

insulation broke down and the cable failed within a few weeks. The first successful cable was

laid in 1865 between Brest, France and Duxbury, Massachusetts and worked successfully for

many years, passing telegraphic signals at a speed of 2 words per minute ( 0.01 bps!). The first

copper-insulated, trans-Atlantic telephone cable was laid in 1956. By 1950, over 750,000 miles

of copper-based undersea cable had been installed between all of the major continents (ICPC,

2009]. This was followed by the first fiber optic cable TAT-8 installed between Europe and

North America in 1988. By 2009, some 500,000 miles of fiber optic cable has been deployed,

and has largely replaced all copper cable traffic due to the much higher bandwidths approaching

several terabytes/sec (See Figure 2).


Because signals degrade in strength as they travel through thousands of miles of

copper, devices called repeaters are added to the cable every 50 miles or so, and are powered

by a current flowing through a separate HV power line that parallels the cable from end to end.

Loss of power to a cable can cause immediate loss of signal, so all cables must be continuously

powered through connection to the domestic power grid or back-up generators. These voltages

can exceed 500 kV, and pose an electrocution hazard to fishing boats that accidentally snag

them. Cables are typically broken through fishing accidents, earthquakes and mechanical failure

about 150 times a year, causing a loss of communication capacity that may last from days to

weeks depending on the depth of the required repair (ICPC, 2009). Because the repair site may

only be a meter or so in length, modern repair ships routinely use GPS to reach the proper

location of the identified failed repeater, or cable damage. Also, GPS systems are used in

deploying fiber optic cables along exact, preplanned routes that minimize cable waste.

There is no formal requirement for communications companies to log cable outage

events, especially in a public archive. Consequently, outages only become public knowledge

when they impact public telecommunications activities. For example, on February 25, 2012 the

East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) data cable linking East Africa to the Middle East and

Europe was severed off the coast of Kenya by a ship that illegally dropped anchor in a restricted

area. This cable was already taking the traffic from three other fiber optic cables that had been

damaged only 10 days before. It would take three weeks before this cable could be repaired,

and data and e-commerce traffic restored to Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and

Ethiopia. [Parnell, 2012].

Copper-based submarine cables are deployed in a manner similar to the old-style

telegraph cables, and for this reason are subject to the same space weather impacts, though for

different reasons, and perhaps not the ones you might initially consider. The original telegraphic

systems and submarine cables of the 1800s were single conductors through which one-half of

the battery was connected. The other half of the battery was grounded to the local Earth to

complete the circuit! This works well when the naturally-occurring terrestrial ground current is

stable in time, and over large geographic distances comparable to the telegraph network,

however both of these conditions are badly violated during a geomagnetic storm.

During a geomagnetic storm, a strong ionospheric current appears, called the electrojet.

This current generates a secondary magnetic field that penetrates the local ground and induces

additional ground currents to flow called a Geomagnetically-Induced Current or GIC. Any single-

wire telegraph system will immediately detect this GIC, which can be much greater than the

original battery current, hence the frequent reports about mysterious high voltages and

equipment burn out. The older trans-Atlantic cables were not immune from this because they,

too, were patterned after the single-wire telegraph system and so GICs were a corresponding

problem on these systems. For example, the geomagnetic storm that occurred on 2 August

1972 produced a voltage surge of 60 volts on AT&T’s coaxial telephone cables between

Chicago and Nebraska. The magnetic disturbance had a peak rate of change of 2200 nT/min,

observed at the Geological Survey of Canada's Meanook Magnetic Observatory, near

Edmonton, and a rate of change of the magnetic field at the cable location estimated at 700

nT/min. The induced electric field at the cable was calculated to have been 7.4 V/km, exceeding

the 6.5 V/km threshold at which the line would experience a high current shutdown. [Space

Weather Canada, 2011]

One might think that modern-day fiber optic cables are immune from this GIC effect

because they involve a non-conductive optical fiber. High voltage power is supplied to the cable

at each end, with one end being at V+ and the other at V- potential. Just as for telegraph

systems, one side of the HV supply is grounded to Earth, which provides a pathway for GICs.

Repeaters for boosting the signal are connected in series along the cable axis and supplied by a

coaxial power cable. GIC currents can temporarily overload the local power supply, causing

repeaters to temporarily fail, and usually require resetting.

Have any incidents involving fiber optic cables ever been reported? We are mindful of

the old adage that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. The fact that

there is no impartial way to track outages on modern fiber optic telecommunications cables, and

there are no federal regulations that require this reporting, means that reports are voluntary.

When we search through public documents and find no cases of space weather-related cable

outages, it only means that we cannot choose between two equally likely situations: Either they

do occur and are not reported to save embarrassment, or the public records are unbiased and

so lack of examples indicated lack of an impact. There are, however, some notable examples:

“At the time of the March 1989 storm, a new transatlantic telecommunications fiber-optic cable

was in use. It did not experience a disruption, but large induced voltages were observed on the

power supply cables”. [Space Weather Canada, 2011]

1.2 Ground-based computer systems

Solar storms can be a rich source of energetic particles via shock-produced Solar Proton

Events (SPEs), galactic cosmic ray (GCR) enhancements during sunspot minimum, or events

taking place within the magnetosphere during the violent magnetic reconnection events

attending a geomagnetic storm. Although high-energy cosmic rays can penetrate to the ground

and provide about 10% of our natural radiation background, secondary neutrons can be

generated in air showers and penetrate at much higher fluxes to the ground. A number of

monitoring stations, such as the Delaware Neutron Monitor, provide day-to-day measurements

of the GCR secondary neutron background and detect ground-level enhancements (GLEs). At

aviation altitudes, these high-energy neutrons can produce avionics upsets, which are easily

corrected by error detection and correction (EDAC) algorithms or multiply-redundant avionics

systems. On the ground, and ostensibly shielded by a thick atmosphere, computer systems and

chip manufacturing processes have been allegedly affected by solar storm events (Tribble

,2010). Trying to identify even one case where such ‘computer glitches’ were caused by GCR or

space weather events remains problematical. Nevertheless, consumers and governments

expect their computer systems to function reliably (computer virus attacks excepted), so even

manufacturers such as Intel take this issue seriously. US patent 7,309,866, was assigned to

Intel for their invention of "Cosmic ray detectors for integrated circuit chips". [Hannah, 2004]

“Cosmic particles in the form of neutrons or protons can collide randomly with silicon nuclei in

the chip and fragment some of them, producing alpha-particles and other secondary particles,

including the recoiling nucleus…. Cosmic ray induced computer crashes have occurred and are

expected to increase with frequency as devices (for example, transistors) decrease in size in

chips. This problem is projected to become a major limiter of computer reliability in the next

decade.”

Bit-flip errors, in which the contents of a memory cell become switched from a ‘0’ state to

a ‘1’ state or vice versa, are a pernicious form of Single Event Upset (SEU) that continues to

plague ground based computer systems that use high-density ‘VLSI’ memory. The mechanism

is that a high-energy neutron collides with a substrate or gate nucleus, producing a burst of

secondary charged particles. These electrons and ions drift into a memory cell and increase the

stored charge until a state threshold is achieved, at which point the cell indicates a high-Q state

of ‘1’ rather than a relatively empty, low-Q state of ‘0’; hence the bit-flip error. Extensive testing

and research to identify the origin of these soft-memory errors led to alpha particle emission

from naturally occurring radioisotopes in the solder and substrate materials themselves.

Extensive re-tooling of the fabrication techniques, however, failed to completely eliminate SEUs.

Currently, a system with 1 Gby of RAM can expect one soft-memory error every week, and a 1

terabyte system can experience SEUs every few minutes. Error detection and correction

(EDAC) algorithms cost power and speed, and do not handle multi-bit errors where the parity

does not change. [Tezzaron, 2003]. According to Paul Dodd, manager for the radiation effects

branch at Sandia National Labs, "It could be happening on everyone's PC, but instead

everyone curses Microsoft. Software bugs probably cause a lot of those blue-screen problems,

but you can trace some of them back to radiation effects." [Santarini, 2005].

Although there are no specific, documented examples of ground-based computer

crashes due to specific solar storms, it is legitimate to consider what might be the societal

consequences of space weather-induced computer glitches. If they occur from time to time, it is

instructive to consider the impact that other more prosaic glitches have produced:

March 2, 2012 - Computer glitch hits Brazil’s biggest airline. Brazil’s biggest airline says a

computer glitch took down its check-in system in several airports across the country, causing

long delays [boston.com, 2012]

November 5, 2011 - HSBC systems crash affects millions across UK. HSBC was today hit by a

nationwide systems crash thought to have affected millions of customers. The bank's cash

machines, branches, debit cards, and internet banking services all stopped working at 2.45pm

after a computer glitch. [Paxman, 2011]

1.3 Space-based Computers

The first documented space weather event on a satellite occurred on Telstar-1 launched

in July1963. By November, it had suddenly ceased to operate. By exposing the ground-based

duplicate Telstar to various radiation backgrounds, Bell Telephone Laboratory engineers were

able to trace the problem to the gate of a single transistor in the satellite’s command decoder.

Apparently, excess charge had built up on the gate, and by simply turning the satellite off for a

few seconds, the problem disappeared. By January, 1963 the satellite was back in commercial

operation relaying trans-Atlantic television programs between Europe and North America (Reid,

1963).

During the 1960’s, a number of NASA reports carefully documented the scope and

nature of space weather-induced satellite and spacecraft malfunctions. There was as yet no

significant commercial investment in space, so NASA was free to analyze glitches to its own

satellites and interplanetary spacecraft. Of course military satellites of ever increasing

complexity, cost, and political sensitivity were also deployed, but no unclassified documents

were then, or are now, available to compare space weather impacts across many different

satellite platforms. This leads to an important issue that is crucial to impact assessment and

mitigation. How can we assess risks and prospective economic losses when so much of the

required data is protected through national secrecy regulations and commercial confidentiality?

Even among the ‘public domain’ NASA satellites, data as to the number and severity of ‘glitches’

is usually buried in the ‘housekeeping’ data and rarely makes it out of the daily briefing room

since it is irrelevant to the scientific data-gathering enterprise.

In a perfect world, we would like to have data for all of the 2000+ currently operational

satellites that describes the numbers, dates and types of spacecraft anomalies that they

experienced. From this we would be able to deduce how to mitigate the remaining radiation

effects, identify especially sensitive satellites and quantify their reliability, and to develop

accurate models for forecasting when specific satellites will be most vulnerable. In reality, much

of what we can learn is by ‘reading between the lines’ in news reports, correlating these biased

forms of information against the known space weather events, and hoping that a deterministic

pattern emerges. Even this has been a daunting challenge when adjacent satellites in orbit can

experience the same space weather conditions, but have very different anomalies, thereby

making correlations between space weather conditions and satellite anomalies seem less

certain.

1.3.1 How does it happen?

Satellite anomalies can be broadly defined to include any event in which some operating

mode of a satellite differs from an expected or planned condition. In this context, the term

‘anomaly’ is extremely broad, spanning a continuum of severities from trivial satellite state

changes and inconsequential data corruption, to fatal conditions leading to satellite loss. Actual

data from satellite-born sensors shows that these events can be quite numerous. For instance,

SOHO data from a 2 GBy onboard Solid State Recorder typically records > 1000 SEUs/day

(Brecca et al, 2004). Only rarely, however, do SEUs actually lead to satellite conditions requiring

operator attention – a condition commonly termed an anomaly. For SOHO, only ~60 anomalies

during an 8-year period (~ 8 anomalies/satellite/year) have required significant operator

intervention, despite the literally millions of SEU events recorded during this time.


Anomalies need not be fatal to be economically problematical. On January 20, 1994 the

Anik E1 and E2 satellites were severely affected by electrostatic discharges (ESDs). Although

the satellites were not fatally damaged, they required up to $70 million in repair costs and lost

revenue, and accrued $30 million for additional operating costs over their remaining life spans

(Bedingfield, Leach and Alexander, 1996). The Anik satellite problems were apparently the

result of a single ESD event affecting each satellite (Stassinopoulos et al., 1996), suggesting

that large numbers of anomalies are not required to 'take out' a satellite. If anomalies are

frequent enough, however, the odds of a satellite failure must also increase, as will the work

load to satellite operations. According to FUTRON (2003), satellite operators ordinarily spend

up to 40 percent of their time on anomaly-related activities. Ferris (2001) has estimated the cost

of dealing with satellite anomalies as $4,300/event leading to overall operations impacts

approaching $1 million/satellite/year under apparently routine space weather conditions.

Anecdotal reports suggest that during major solar storms, far higher operator activity can occur.

For example, the GOES-7 satellite experienced 36 anomalies on October 20, 1989 during a

single, severe solar storm event (Wilkinson, 1994).

The issue of ‘how bad can it get?’ is an interesting one, especially given our dramatically

increased reliance upon GEO satellite systems since ca 1980 that are economically baselined

on the assumption of 100% reliability during a 10 to 15 year satellite service life span. The ~250

GEO satellites now in operation produce an annual revenue of $80 billion (Ferster, 2005) so any

space weather impact is potentially costly, and can involve more than one satellite at a time.

Satellite designers use sophisticated tools to assess radiation hazards under ‘worst case’

conditions (e.g. the August 1972 and March ,1991 events) however, recent studies of extreme

space weather conditions suggest that the period since ca 1960 has not been typical of the

historical record of severe storms during the last 500 years (McCracken et al., 2001; Townsend,

2003). Moreover, there is a large discrepancy between models that predict, for example, SEU

events and actual satellite observations of them (e.g. Hoyos, Evans and Daly, 2004). Some

recent studies have attempted to estimate the economic consequences to commercial GEO

satellites for severe solar storm episodes (e.g. Odenwald and Green, 2007), but the studies

were hampered by the lack of detailed knowledge of how the frequencies of satellite anomalies

vary in severity with storm intensity. Consequently, the loss of a satellite during a severe space

weather event could not be modeled realistically, nor its economic impact properly assessed.

Most reported anomalies, broadly defined, are nuisances involving recoverable data

corruption, easily-corrected phantom commands, or 'bit flips' often caught by onboard EDAC

algorithms. These are not the kinds of anomalies that lead to significant economic

consequences for a commercial satellite. Other less frequent anomalies cause sub-system

failures, out-of-spec satellite operations, attitude and telemetry-lock errors and even outright

satellite failures. These are most certainly the kinds of anomalies that have economic

consequences. Some authors have also classified anomalies by satellite orbital location (e.g.

LEO, MEO, GEO), recognizing that each environment has its own physical drivers for anomaly

generation, but more often than not, these classes are aggregated together. Here is one

possible scheme:

Class 1 - Mission-Failure - The satellite ceases operation as a consequence of an

unrecoverable system malfunction. ( e.g. Telstar-401)

Class 2 - Mission interruption - involves a recoverable damage to sub-systems. Only built-in

redundancies, if available, are capable of mitigating some of these problems, where the

satellite's safe mode may be enabled, or a back-up subsystem has to be activated (e.g. Anik-

E1). These may take hours of effort to remedy, at a cost to satellite revenue and operator

overhead charges.

Class 3 - Performance decrease - can include spacecraft pointing errors, attitude control

system error, or a brief loss of data or telemetry usually corrected by a manual or automatic

system reset.

Class 4 - Inconsequential - memory bit-flips and switching errors easily corrected using on-

board EDAC software, or simple operator action. (e.g. TDRSS-1 telemetry; cosmic ray

corruption of Hubble Space Telescope data).

One of the earliest, and most detailed, publically available studies of satellite anomalies

and reliability is the work by Hecht and Hecht (1986 : the Hecht Report). The study was based

on 2,593 anomaly reports for 300 satellites launched between ca 1960 and 1984. There were

~350 satellites in operation by ca 1984, so the Hecht Report is relatively complete. This ground-

breaking study analyzed the detailed reports provided by 96 satellite programs. A 'failure' was

defined as "…the loss of operation of any function, part, component or subsystem, whether or

not redundancy allowed the recovery of operation”. Their study identified 213 Class 1 and 192

Class 2 anomalies out of a total collection of 2593 anomalies for a mission failure rate defined

by our Class 1 of about 405/2593 or 1 in 6. No attempt was made to correlate the anomalies

with space weather conditions.

One of the most widely used, recent starting points for anomaly studies is the archive

assembled by Wilkinson and Allen (1997; hereafter NGDC) which identifies most of the 259

satellites by name, or code, along with orbital location and/or altitude information. The date and

type of anomaly is provided for many of the 5,033 events spanning the time period from 1970 to

1997, so that a proper assessment can be attempted of the various category-specific anomaly

rates as a function of date and satellite type. There are 3,640 events that have been tagged

according to type and system impact, including 647 SEU events and 848 ESD events. The

NGDC archive contains 43 commercial GEO satellites included in the archive, accounting for a

total of 480 anomalies spanning 20 years, and also appears to contain about 40% of all

operating satellites during the sample time span, and is relatively complete for our purposes.

The average annual anomaly rate of the GEO satellites was found to be about 3

anomalies/satellite/year, but can rise to twice or three times this rate during enhanced space

weather conditions.

Robertson and Stoneking (2005: Goddard) examined 128 severe (Class 1 and 2)

anomalies among 764 satellites. The data were culled from web-based satellite anomaly lists

including the 'Airclaims Space Track' as well as NASA documents and the Aerospace

Corporation 'Space Systems Engineering Database', and only included satellites from the US,

Europe, Japan or Canada. The total number of satellites (military + commercial) operating

during this interval is 827, so the sample contains about 92 % of all possible operational

systems during the 1990-2001 time period. A total of 35 anomalies were Class 1, which led to

what was considered the total loss of the satellites. About one anomaly in four (Class 1 vs Class

1 + 2) is of the severe Class 1. Their calculated anomaly rate was based on the number of

anomalies recorded, divided by the number of satellites launched during a given year. Re-

normalizing their mishap rates to, instead, reflect the annual operating satellites, the average

mishap rate for Classes 1+2 is about 0.019 +/- 0.006 anomalies/sat/year. The inverse of this

rate is 166 which is sometimes called the mean time to failure (MTF). Clearly for commercial

satellites expected to last 10 to 15 years before replacement, a MTF of 166 years is good news!

The correlation between these anomalies and space weather events was not studied.

The extensive studies by Belov et al (2004), and Dorman et al (2004), included satellite

anomaly reports based on 300 satellites and ~6,000 anomalies spanning the time period from

1971 to 1994. The data was drawn from NASA archives, the NGDS archive and unpublished

reports from 49 Kosmos satellites (1971-1997). The term 'anomaly' was never precisely defined,

but since the survey included the NGDC archive without distinction, we can assume that all

Class 1-4 events were grouped together. The sample included 136 satellites in GEO orbits.

They deduced that there were typically 1 to 10 anomalies/satellite/year. Specifically, the LEO

Kosmos satellites experienced 1-7 anomalies/satellite/year, however some Kosmos satellites

(Kosmos 1992 and 2056) reported ~30 anomalies/satellite/year. Their statistical analysis

indicated that anomalies occur during days when specific space weather parameters

(electron/proton fluxes, Dst, Ap, etc) are disturbed. The largest increases coincide with times

when electron and proton fluences are large, and can cause up to 50-times enhancements in

anomalies over quiet-time conditions. There appears to be a threshold of 1,000 pfu (E > 10

Mev) for proton fluxes, below which there are few anomalies reported. The anomalies continue

to remain high for two days after the SPE event.

Koons et al. (1999) published 'The Impact of the Space Environment on Space

Systems', which investigated a sample of 326 anomaly 'records' collected from a diverse

assortment of satellites culled from the NGDC 'Satellite Anomaly Manager', Orbital Data

Acquisition Program (ODAP: Aerospace Corp), NASA's Anomaly reports (Bedingfield et al.

1996, and Leach and Alexander, 1997), and the USAF Anomaly Database maintained by the

55th Space Weather Squadron. The specific number of satellites involved was not stated,

however the ODAP archive contains information from 15 USAF and 91 non-Air Force 'programs'

no doubt drawn from LEO, MEO and GEO satellite populations. Although no information was

provided as to the time period spanned by the study, the individual archives extend from 1970 to

1997. The definition of a Record in terms of anomalies can vary enormously. Each record

contained information for one class of anomalies for one 'vehicle'. Anomalies of a similar class

were of the same functional type. Approximately 299 records out of 326 (92%) have causes

diagnosed as 'space environment' but this does not necessarily correlate with a count based on

anomaly frequencies. An example cited is that one record for the MARECS-A satellite included

617 anomalies. About 51/326 records were from commercial satellite systems and programs. In

terms of the distribution of the records with anomaly diagnosis, 162 (= 49%) were associated

with Electrostatic Discharges, 85 (= 26%) with SEUs, and 16 ( =5%) with 'total radiation

damage'. Based on 173 reports of how quickly the anomalies were rectified, the Koons et al

(1999) study indicates that the number of mission failures represents 9/173 reports for a

frequency rate of 1 in 19. The rates for the other classes are: Class 2 (More than 1 week) =

39%; Class 3 (1 hr to 1 week) = 35% and Class 4 (Less than 1 hour) = 20%.

Ferris (2001) analyzed 9,200 satellite operations discrepancy reports from 11 satellites

between 1992-2001. A 'discrepancy' was defined as "...the perception by a satellite operator

that some portion of the space system had failed to operate as desired." The satellites were

selected on the basis of which operators and owners were willing to divulge detailed anomaly

logs for this study, which is a strong bias probably in favor of systems that had low absolute

rates and few critical failures. Only three of the satellites were communications satellites; none

were for civilian commercial use. This, of itself, is a problem since we cannot know to what

extent these satellites are typical, or whether they are pathological. This is often the case when

working with studies in which the satellite identities are not publically revealed. Of the

discrepancies catalogued, only 13% involved the satellites themselves. The vast majority, 48%,

involved issues with the ground segment, and specifically, most were discrepancies generated

by software issues (~61% of total discrepancies). Typical discrepancy rates involving 1,200

events imply ~13 discrepancies/satellite/year. There were, however, higher rates recorded in

1996 involving 160 events for 4 satellites for a rate of 40 discrepancies/satellite/year or about

one every 9 days. The study was the first one published in the open literature that also provided

an assessment of the cost of rectifying these anomalies. Routine problems that require no more

than 10 minutes to resolve by a team of 8 people cost $800 per event. More significant

problems requiring 3-8 hours and more people cost $4,300 per event. The estimate only

included man-hours and an average of the resolution times for the logged events, and not the

cost of equipment or materials. In the latter case an 'event' may include the replacement of part

of the ground station, processors or other mechanical items.

Cho and Nozaki (2005) investigated the frequency of ESDs on the solar panels of five

LANL satellites between 1993 – 2003. During this period, LANL 1989-046 experienced 6038

ESDs/year while LANL-92A recorded 290 ESDs each year. Although the cumulative lifetime

ESD rates on solar panels can exceed 6,000 events/kW over 15 years, the chances of a

catastrophic satellite failure involving substantial loss of satellite power, remains small, though

not negligible. For example, in 1973, the DSCS-9431 satellite failed as a result of an ESD event.

More recently, the Tempo-2 (1998) and ADEOS-2 (2003) satellites were also similarly lost.

Koons et al (1991, 2000) and Dorman et al (2005) have shown that ESDs appear to be

ultimately responsible for half of all mission failures (e.g. Class 1 anomalies) and correlated with

space weather events.

Wahlund et al (1999) have studied 291 ESD events on the Freja satellite (MEO orbit)

and have found that the number of ESDs increases with increasing Kp. A similar relationship

between increasing Kp and anomaly frequency was found by Fennell et al (2000) for the

SCATHA satellite (near-GEO orbit). These results are consistent with earlier GOES-4 and 5

satellite studies by Farthing et al. (1982) and by Mullen et al. (1986). In addition to Kp, Fennell

et al (2000) and Wrenn, Rogers and Ryden (2002) identified a correlation between 300 keV

electron fluxes and the probability of internal ESDs from the SCATHA satellite. The probability

increases dramatically for electron fluxes in excess of 100,000 pfu. A similar result was found a

number of years earlier by Vampola (1987). At daily total fluences of ~1012 electrons/cm2 the

probability of an ESD occurring on a satellite exponentially reaches 100% (e.g. Baker, 2000).

1.3.2 That Was Then – This is Now.

During the 23rd Sunspot Cycle (1996-2008) there were dozens of satellite malfunctions

and failures noted soon after a major solar storm event, beginning with Telstar-401 (1996) and

ending with the Japanese research satellite ASCA on October 29, 2003. The current ‘24th’ cycle

has had its own satellite outages and malfunctions of note, with the majority of the solar activity

still several years in the future.

On August 25, 2011 South Africa's $13 million LEO satellite SumbandilaSat failed, and

the explicit cause was stated publically to be 'damage from a recent solar storm', which caused

the satellite's onboard computer to stop responding to commands from the ground station. This

was not, however, the first time this satellite was damaged by radiation. Shortly after its launch

in September 2009, radiation caused a power distribution failure that rendered the Z-axis and

Y-axis wheel permanently inoperable, meaning that the craft tumbles as it orbits and has lost

the ability to capture imagery from the green, blue and xantrophyll spectral bands. The reason

given for the lack of proper radiation hardening was that there was not enough money to do this

properly, and the satellite was built from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment.

Moreover, SumbandilaSat was intended only as a technology demonstrator. [Martin, 2012]

The case of the Anik F2 'technical anomaly' on October 6, 2011 is a replay of similar

stories during the 23rd cycle. The satellite entered a Safe Mode that caused it to stop

functioning and turn away from Earth. The Boeing satellite was launched in 2004 and was

expected to function for 15 years. The owner of the satellite, Telsat, indicated in public news

articles that they did not believe the problem had to do with the arrival of a CME that reached

Earth early the same morning, but was caused by some other unspecified internal issue with the

satellite itself. It is the first serious anomaly of its kind since the satellite was launched in 2004.

What the news reports failed to mention was that the sun has been relatively quiet for the

majority of this 7 year period. [Mack, 2011]

The temporary outage of Anik F2 caused a number of problems that impacted millions of

people covered by this satellite service. WildBlue satellite ISP in the United States uses Anik F2

to provide broadband services to about a third of its customers. A total of more than 420,000

subscribing households mostly in parts of rural America lost service for several days, along with

ATM service. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation indicated that 39 rural communities, and

7,800 people lost long-distance phone service. The satellite is also used for air traffic control,

causing the grounding of 48 First Air flights, and 1000 passengers, in northern Canada.

Communities in the North West Territories were instructed to activate their emergency response

committees, and start using their Iridium phones. [Mack, 2012; CBS News, 2012; Marowits,

2011]

April 5, 2010 - Galaxy 15 experienced an electrostatic discharge that caused a severe

malfunction, rendering the satellite capable of re-transmitting any received signal at full-power,

but not able to receive new commanding [de Shelding, 2011]. Reports cited a space weather

event on April 5 as the probable cause of the electrostatic discharge that was the likely

triggering event, however although Intelsat acknowledged the ESD origin, they categorically

refuted the space weather cause in the April 5 solar event, preferring to declare that the orgin of

the ESD was unknown. A consequence of this type of satellite failure is that Galaxy-15 was

potentially able to interfere with other GEO satellites as it came within 0.5 degrees of their

orbital slots. Thanks to careful, and complex, maneuvering of the satellites to maximize their

distance from this satellite as it entered their orbital slots, AMC-11, Galaxy-13, Galaxy-18,

Galaxy-23 and SatMex-6 and Anik F3 were able to reduce or eliminate interference, and no

impacts to broadcasting were reported or acknowledged. "The fact that you haven't heard about

channels lost or interference is the proof that we have been able to avoid issues operationally,"

said Nick Mitsis, an Intelsat spokesperson. "I don't want to underplay that." [Clark, 2010]. In

January 2011 commanding of the satellite resumed and its ’zombisat’ moniker has been

changed to ‘phoenix’.

1.4 Cellular and Satellite Telephones

Although telephone calls by land lines are among the safest communication technology,

and the most resistant to space weather effects, they have also been in rapid decline thanks to

the wide spread adoption of cellular and mobile phones, especially among the under-30

population. According to an article in The Economist [2009] customers are discontinuing

landline subscriptions at a rate of 700,000 per month, and that by 2025 this technology will have

gone the way of telegraphy. Between 2005 and 2009, the number of households with cell

phone-only subscriptions rose from 7% to 20%. In terms of space weather vulnerability, there is

one important caveat. Without an electrical power grid, conventional land-lines fail, and cell

phones may not be recharged even though the cell towers may have emergency back up power

capability. An example of this vulnerability occurs whenever natural disasters strike and cell

towers are unavailable, or the crushing load of cell traffic renders the local tower network

unusable. Moreover, one does not have to wait for power grid failure to have an impact on cell

phone access during episodes of solar activity.


A seminal paper by Lanzerotti et al. (2005) demonstrates that solar radio bursts, which

occur rather often in an active photosphere, can cause enhanced noise at the frequencies used

by cellphones (900 MHz to 1900 MHz), when the observer’s angle between the cell tower and

the sun is small. This interference effect shows up in the Dropped-Call statistic for east-facing

receivers at sunrise or west-facing receivers at sunset. For a given cell phone and cell tower in

the optimal line-of-sight geometry with respect to the sun on the horizon, dropped calls occur

about once every 3 days during solar maximum, and every 18 days during solar minimum. The

article notes that the detailed, direct, evidence for solar-burst influence on cell phones remains a

proprietary issue not openly available for investigation. The authors note that "solar bursts

exceeding about 1000 sfu (solar flux units, 1 sfu = 10−22 W m−2 Hz−1) can potentially cause

significant interference when the Sun is within the base-station antenna beam, which can

happen for east- or west-facing antennas during sunrise and sunset at certain times of the

year." Because base stations are only vulnerable for about two hours each day during sunrise

and sunset, a typical station might be affected about one day out of 42 for solar maximum, and

one day in 222 during solar minimum.

1.5 GPS-based Systems

Navigation by satellite is not a new technology, and was first introduced by the US Navy

in 1960 with the orbiting of five Transit satellites. This system was replaced by the NAVSTAR-

GPS system in the 1970s. The first commercial use of satellite-based global positioning systems

came less than 1 year after the next generation, 24-satellite 'Block I-GPS' constellation had

been deployed in 1994, when Oldsmobile offered the GuideStar navigation system for its high-

end automobiles. The GPS satellites provided an L1 channel at 1575 MHz capable of 10-meter-

scale precision, that in 1990 was 'selectively degraded' to 100-meter precision. In 1999,

President Clinton ordered that selective availability be turned off, and on May 1, 2000 the

modern era of non-military GPS was ushered-in. Since 2000, the commercial applications of

GPS have enormously expanded to include, not only car navigation aids, but oil extraction, fiber

optic cable deployment, civilian aviation, emergency services, and even expanding public

cellphone services, called apps, to locate nearby stores, restaurants and even parking spaces in

downtown Manhattan! A report by Berg Insight (2011) indicates that GPS-enabled mobile

phones reached 300 million units in 2011, and is expected to reach nearly 1 billion units by

2015.

Although the GPS constellation is stationed in polar orbits that frequently pass through

the van Allen radiation belts in MEO, they are well-shielded and are upgraded every 5-10 years

through replacement satellites such as the Block-II and Block-IIII systems. Although the details

of the frequency of satellite anomalies is highly classified, it can be surmised that a legacy of 40

years of space operations has left the GPS system with a broad assortment of mitigation

strategies for essentially eliminating outages. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of GPS system

operation that cannot be so easily eliminated.

GPS signals must be delivered to ground stations by passage through the ionosphere.

Because radio propagation through an ionized medium causes signal delays, and accurate

timing signals are important in locating a receiver in 3-dimensional space, any changes in

ionospheric electron content along the propagation path will cause position errors in the final

solution. Space weather events, especially X-ray flares, cause increased ionization and

introduce time-dependent propagation delays that can last for many hours until the excess

ionospheric charge is dissipated through recombination. This also causes amplitude and phase

variations called scintillation, which causes GPS receivers to loose lock on a satellite. Since a

minimum of 4 satellites are required to determine a position, excess scintillation can result not

just in a bad position solution, but can cause a loss-of-lock so that not enough satellites are

available for various locations at various times during the event.

When civilian, single-frequency GPS systems using the L1 frequency are used, the

anomalous propagation problem has to be mitigated by reference to a 'GPS Ionospheric

Broadcast Model' and making the appropriate corrections. The resulting accuracy is about 5

meters. But this correction can only work for a limited period of time and so the path-delay

problem is only partially solved. The result is that most civilian GPS systems can be easily

disturbed by solar activity. Dual-frequency GPS systems that operate at L1 (1575 MHz) and L2

(1228 MHz ) can measure the differential propagation of the satellite signal in real-time, and by

relating this to the plasma dispersion equation, calculate the instantaneous total electron

content (TEC) along a path, and then use this to make the requisite on-the-spot timing

correction. In fact, this method can be turned around by using networks of GPS receivers to

actually map out the changing ionospheric structure over many geographic locations. Figure 5

shows one such 'TEC' calculation for April 20, 2012 for 19:00 UT developed by JPL. The black

spots are the GPS receivers in the network. Green indicates a TEC of about 50 x 1016

electrons/meter2 while red indicates 80 x 1016 electrons/meter2. Generally, a TEC of 6 x 1016

electrons/meter2 corresponds to an uncorrected position error of about 1 meter. The figure

displays potential position errors as high as 13 meters over Chile.


Although the L1 carrier signal can be received without special instrumentation, the L2

timing information is coded and not accessible to non-military receivers. However, by using a

technique called differential GPS, civilian GPS systems now rival, or even exceed, military

precision in those areas where the requisite DGPS ground reference stations are available. If

you are navigating in a large city, DGPS is probably available to you, but if you are 'in the

middle of nowhere' chances are you only have single-frequency GPS to guide you.

We have already discussed this briefly in the context of GPS signal propagation and

ionospheric scintillation. Because many space weather phenomena couple efficiently to the

ionosphere, it is unsurprising that space weather issues have always been foremost in the

discussion of GPS accuracy and reliability even apart from the fact that the GPS satellites

themselves are frequently located in one of the most 'radio-active' regions of the

magnetosphere.

One of the first unclassified studies to quantitatively assess GPS behavior under solar

storm conditions was conducted, inadvertently, by NOAA in 2001. They had set up a network of

70 GPS receivers from Alaska to Florida to test a new weather observation and climate

monitoring system called the GPS-MET Demonstration Network. A major geomagnetic storm

between March 30 and 31 caused significant changes in the GPS formal error, and was

correlated with the published Kp index during the course of the event [NOAA, 2001]. Since

then, a variety of anomalous changes in GPS precision have been definitively traced to, and

found to be correlated with, geomagnetic storms and solar flare events. This also means that

systems that rely on GPS for high-precision positioning have almost routinely reported

operational upsets of one kind or another. For example [NOAA, 2004]:

October 29, 2003 - the FAA’s GPS-based Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) was

severely affected. The ionosphere was so disturbed that the vertical error limit was

exceeded, rendering WAAS unusable. The drillship GSF C.R. Luigs encountered significant

differential GPS (DGPS) interruptions because of solar activity. These interruptions made

the DGPS solutions unreliable. The drillship ended up using its acoustic array at the seabed

as the primary solution for positioning when the DGPS solutions were affected by space

weather.

December 6, 2006 - the largest solar radio burst ever recorded affected GPS receivers

over the entire sunlit side of the Earth. There was a widespread loss of GPS in the

mountain states region, specifically around the four corners region of New Mexico and

Colorado. Several aircraft reported losing lock on GPS. This event was the first of its kind to

be detected on the FAA, WAAS network.

Apart from changes in ionospheric propagation, we have the problem that, if the GPS

signal cannot be detected by the ground station, and the minimum of 4 satellites is not detected,

a position solution will not be available at any accuracy. This situation can arise if the GPS

signal is actively blocked or jammed, or if the natural background radio noise level at the L1 and

L2 frequencies is too high. This can easily happen during radio outbursts that accompany solar

flare events. This happened the day after the December 5, 2006 solar flare, and was intensively

studied by Kintner at Cornell, and presented at the Space Weather Enterprise Forum in

Washington, DC on April 4, 2007 [NOAA, 2007].

1.6 Electrical Power Grids

Although the issue of space weather impacts to the electrical power grid will be covered

more extensively in a future volume, we will review the main points of this vulnerability, provide

concrete examples, and review briefly the impacts and consequences of future large

geomagnetic storms.

It has been well known for decades that geomagnetic storms causes changes in the

terrestrial ground current. The most dramatic examples of this effect are in the many reports of

telegraph system failures during the 1800s. So long as a system requires an 'earth ground', its

circuit is vulnerable to the intrusion of geomagnetically-induced currents (GICs). For the electric

power grid, these DC currents do not need to exceed much above 100 amperes in order to do

damage (Odenwald,1999, Kappenmann, 2010 ).

When GICs enter a transformer, the added DC current causes the relationship between

the AC voltage and current to change. It only takes a hundred amperes of GIC current or less to

cause a transformer to overload during one-half of its 60-cycle operation. As the transformer

switches 120 times a second between being saturated and unsaturated, the normal hum of a

transformer becomes a raucous, crackling whine physicists call magnetostriction.

Magnetostriction generates hot spots inside the transformer where temperatures can increase

very rapidly to hundreds of degrees in only a few minutes, and last for many hours at a time.

During the March 1989 storm, a transformer at a nuclear plant in New Jersey was damaged

beyond repair as its insulation gave way after years of cumulative GIC damage. During the 1972

storm, Allegheny Power detected transformer temperature of more than 340 F (171 C). Other

transformers have reached temperatures as high as 750 F (400 C). Insulation damage is a

cumulative process over the course of many GICs, and it is easy to see how cumulative solar

storm and geomagnetic effects were overlooked in the past.

Outright transformer failures are much more frequent in geographic regions where GICs

are common. The Northeastern US with the highest rate of detected geomagnetic activity led

the pack with 60% more failures. Not only that, but the average working lifetimes of transformers

is also shorter in regions with greater geomagnetic storm activity. The rise and fall of these

transformer failures even follows a solar activity pattern of roughly 11 years.

The connection between space weather events and terrestrial electrical systems has

been documented a number of times. Some of these examples are legendary (1989, 2003)

while others are obscure (1903, 1921). Given the great number of geomagnetic storms that

have occurred during the last 100 years, and the infrequency of major power outages, this

suggests that blackouts following a major geomagnetic storm are actually quite rare events.

Consider the following historical cases:

November 1, 1903 - The first public mention that electrical power systems could be

disrupted by solar storms appeared in the New York Times, November 2, 1903 "Electric

Phenomena in Parts of Europe". The article described the, by now, usual details of how

communication channels in France were badly affected by the magnetic storm, but the article

then mentions how in Geneva Switzerland, [NYT,1903]

"...All the electrical streetcars were brought to a sudden standstill, and the unexpected

cessation of the electrical current caused consternation at the generating works where all efforts

to discover the cause were fruitless".

May 15, 1921 - The entire signal and switching system of the New York Central Railroad

below 125th street was put out of operation, followed by a fire in the control tower at 57th Street

and Park Avenue. The cause of the outage was later ascribed to a ‘ground current’ that had

invaded the electrical system. Brewster New York, railroad officials formally assigned blame for

a fire destroyed the Central New England Railroad station, to the aurora. [NYT,1921]

August 2, 1972 - The Bureau of Reclamation power station in Watertown, South Dakota

experienced 25,000-volt swings in its power lines. Similar disruptions were reported by

Wisconsin Power and Light, Madison Gas and Electric, and Wisconsin Public Service

Corporation. The calamity from this one storm didn't end in Wisconsin. In Newfoundland,

induced ground currents activated protective relays at the Bowater Power Company. A 230,000-

volt transformer at the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority actually exploded. The

Manitoba Hydro Company recorded 120-megawatt power drops in a matter of a few minutes in

the power it was supplying to Minnesota.

March 13, 1989 - The Quebec Blackout Storm - Most newspapers that reported this

event considered the spectacular aurora to be the most newsworthy aspect of the storm. Seen

as far south as Florida and Cuba, the vast majority of people in the Northern Hemisphere had

never seen such a spectacle in recent memory. At 2:45 AM on March 13, electrical ground

currents created by the magnetic storm found their way into the power grid of the Hydro-Quebec

Power Authority. Network regulation failed within a few seconds as automatic protective

systems took them off-line one by one. The entire 9,500 megawatt output from Hydro-Quebec's

La Grande Hydroelectric Complex found itself without proper regulation. Power swings tripped

the supply lines from the 2000 megawatt Churchill Falls generation complex, and 18 seconds

later, the entire Quebec power grid collapsed. Six million people were affected as they woke to

find no electricity to see them through a cold Quebec wintry night. People were trapped in

darkened office buildings and elevators, stumbling around to find their way out. Traffic lights

stopped working, Engineers from the major North American power companies were worried too.

Some would later conclude that this could easily have been a $6 billion catastrophe affecting

most US East Coast cities. All that prevented the cascade from affecting the United States were

a few dozen capacitors on the Allegheny Network (Odenwald, 1999).

October 30, 2003 - Malmo Sweden, population 50,000 lost electrical power for 50

minutes [Pulkkinen et al., 2005]. The blackout was caused by the tripping of a 130 kV line. It

resulted from the operation of a relay that had a higher sensitivity to the third harmonic (=150

Hz) than to the fundamental frequency (=50 Hz). The excessive amount of the third harmonics

in the system has been concluded to have resulted from transformer saturation caused by GIC.

Currents as high as 330 Amperes were recorded on the Simpevarp-1 transformer. [Wik et al.

,2009]

October, 2003 - South Africa Transformer Damage. The ESKOM Network reported that

15 transformers were damaged by high GIC currents. Figure 6 shows one of the transformers in

a view reminiscent of the legendary images of the 1989 Quebec transformer failure. [Murtagh,

2009]


Extensive studies have already been conducted on the most cost-effective means for

reducing or eliminating GICs in electric power grid components [Kappenman, 2010]. The

strategies generally include adding individual capacitors to each of the transformer HV lines, or

adding a blocking resistor or capacitor to the ground lines in all transformers. Blocking

capacitors were, for example, installed on the entire Hydro-Quebec power grid following the

March 1989 blackout, as well as the WECC region in the western US. Although this strategy

seemed to be successful in reducing GICS and reactive power on some of the lines, the impact

was deemed only modest, 12 to 20% for the WECC network with 50% penetration, given the

cost expended. Adding blocking capacitors to the transformer neutral ground connector (points

A and B in the figure) is the simplest and most direct method for achieving a 100% reduction in

DC, GICs from transformer primaries, but this method is known to alter the impedance of the

network in unpredictable ways as the devices are selectively deployed rather than universally

adopted.

The next most direct, and also the most cost-effective method is by adding a low-

ohmage and low-voltage resistor to the neutral ground of each 3-phase transformer (see red

boxes in figure). Preliminary studies [Kappenman, 2010] suggest that this method could

achieve a 60% reduction in GIC amperages to transformer primaries. The cost would be at most

$100,000 per transformer in the US power grid, which contains some 5000 transformers, for a

total cost of about $500 million. A simulation of the Hydro-Quebec power grid during the 1989

failure, but with neutral ground resistors installed reveals a dramatic reduction in the GICs to

which the 45 transformers in the 735 kV grid were subjected, with hypothetical 10-ohm blocking

resistors reducing the GICs from 550 amps to only about 75 amps. A comparison of the

application of 5-ohm blocking resistors to the US power grid during the March 1989

geomagnetic storm is shown in Figure 1.

The maximum storm time disturbance was about 450 nT/minute, but even with proper

mitigation, the US grid may not be immune from the largest known geomagnetic events,

although the severity of the impact could be reduced by 60% from the case where no such

mitigation is implemented. During the 1921 storm, a disturbance field of 4800 nT/min was

estimated. Without mitigation, over 500 transformers would be damaged, but with mitigation

only about 40 would be damaged according to these simulations [Kappenman, 2010]. This ten-

fold reduction is not inconsequential.

It is also worth mentioning that, although blackouts are a dramatic consequence of

severe GICs caused by space weather, economic consequences also flow from the on-going

stresses to the power grid during non-black out conditions. For example, Forbes and St. Cyr

(2004) note that the constant impacts of minor space weather events over a long period of time

disrupts the system that transmits the power from where it is generated to where it is distributed

to customers. In examining the determinants of the real-time electricity market price over the

period June 1, 2000, through December 31, 2001, they concluded that solar storms (over this

period) increased the wholesale price of electricity by approximately 3.7 percent or

approximately $500 million. Kappenmann (2012) has recently shown that in the months

following the March 1989 Quebec event, a statistically significant number of transformers in the

United States had to be prematurely replaced, with the greater number of replacements found in

proximity to the Quebec power grid.

Of course, not all electrical power blackouts have anything to do with space weather.

Most of us have experienced at least on ‘outage’, and in some regions like Washington, DC, it is

typical to have 3-5 outages every year lasting from hours to days. Hamachi-LaCommare and

Eto (2004) have studied the economic costs of annual power outages and power ‘sags’ and

have found that they cost as much as $130 billion annually to the GDP. We are accustomed to

electrical blackouts and quietly absorb them into our economy, with some grumbling about lost

food and time. The long term trends for normal blackouts also points to the progressive failures

inherent to an ageing domestic power grid [Karn, 2007]. The over use of this resource is

highlighted by the dramatic growth in bulk power transactions on, for example, the Tennessee

Valley Authority system which exploded from less than 20,000 such transactions in 1996 to

more than 250,000 by the end of 2001. [DOE, 2005].

Increased bulk power transactions have led to a substantial drop in capacity margin,

which provides little room either for growth or to maneuver in times of crisis. By some accounts

[Patterson, 2010] there were 41 blackouts nationwide between 1991-1995, and 92 between

2001-2005. In 2011 alone, there were 109 affecting communities of 50,000 or more people. The

Eaton Corporation, an agrigator of news and industry reports of blackouts across the US states

finds that between 2009 and 2011, the number of power outages rose from 2,169 to 3,041 and

the number of people impacted climbed from 26 million to 42 million [Eaton, 2011].

A ‘typical’ person comes into contact with the following technologies each day: cell

phones, portable computing, credit card verification (ATM), navigation (GPS), electrical utilities

(water pumps, gasoline pumps, hospital facilities, home lighting, city electrification, cell phones-

recharging). All of these ‘essential’ systems rely on electricity either at the point of creation

(satellite GPS and ATM verification) or at the point of delivery (cell phone, gas pump, water,

etc). All are expected to be ready when needed with 100% reliability. In recent human history,

we have been successful in delivering these services even in the face of a number of space

weather events. The lynchpin technology is, of course the electric power grid which citizens use

to ‘tap into’ essential communication and utility resources. It is unlikely that even a Superstorm

event will dramatically impact the number of satellites operational, and backup transponders are

readily available in case of emergencies. The ubiquitous cell phone would not fail if satellites

failed, but satellites do carry the bulk of financial transactions, GPS and military CCC traffic. The

loss of key satellites, or a critical number, would render these services reduced in capability.en

made of the cascading problems involved in ‘re-booting’ such a large grid, especially in the

event of component failures and burn-outs which would necessitate replacement, not on a local

scale, but quite possibly on a global scale, with only a few key manufacturers able to service

these needs.

1.7 Airline Travel

Generally, the known routes for space weather impacts to aviation are through

passenger safety (radiation), flight avionics (computer/system glitches), communications (radio

interference) and scheduling (delays, route changes). Historically there have been anecdotal

instances of each of these being identified. For example,

July 19, 1947 - Sunspots delay planes [New York Times, July 18, 1947 p.15]

Although earlier flight navigation methods involved compass bearings and LORAN-C,

which in principle could be affected by geomagnetic storms and shortwave interference, there

are actually no known instances where space weather events caused significant disruptions to

these navigation technologies. Today, however, the airline industry is adopting GPS navigation

as the new standard, and its implementation in the Wide-Area Augmentation System (WAAS).

WAAS is a combination of GPS and local, ground based metrology reference stations that

provides 1-meter lateral and 1.5-meter vertical position resolution every 6 seconds for aircraft

flying over the continental US, Canada and Alaska. There are also several satellites, such as

Galaxy-15 that are involved in the WAAS system as part of its space-leg. Because its uses

GPS satellites, the WAAS system is not immune to space weather effects that impact the

ionosphere. Consequently during a severe storm event, WAAS may not be available for several

minutes, or even hours, in some regions of the normal coverage area [Doherty, 2011]. Studies

have shown that approaches with vertical guidance (APV) are restricted during times of

geomagnetic activity in terms of the APV coverage with Dst during the period from July 2003 to

March 2004. For airports in which APV coverage is not available, flights must revert to IFR or

VFR landing regulations within a vertical distance of 200 meters of the runway.

A number of national and international studies have been conducted to assess the

radiation load on passengers during active space weather conditions and under otherwise

normal circumstances. Normal background radiation doses are typically 0.3 microSv/hr or 3

mSv/year. For passengers and flight crews, the actual cabin exposure varies with the

geographic latitude of the flight, the altitude of the flight, and the combined GCR and solar fluxes

of particles. For example, Bottollier-Depois et al (2000) determined from direct measurements at

maximum solar activity in 1991-1992 and at minimum activity in 1996-1998. The lowest mean

dose rate measured was 3 microSv/hr during a Paris-Buenos Aires flight in 1991. The highest

rates were 6.6 microSv/hr during a Paris-Tokyo flight on a Siberian route and 9.7 microSv/hr on

Concorde in 1996-1997. A number of similar studies since then have supported the idea that

there is in fact some additional passenger and flight crew radiation exposure caused by space

weather, however the levels are cumulatively very low for the vast majority of passengers who

travel infrequently during the year.

Nevertheless, some airlines that fly polar routes, such as United Airlines, are sensitive to

solar storm events, not necessarily for the added radiation load, but for the disruption of

emergency high-frequency communications with ground controller, which violates FAA safety

regulations. For example, on January 20, 2005 a severe solar storm event caused 26 United

Airlines flights to be detoured to lower altitudes and latitudes. The steady increase in the

number of polar routes suggests a larger number of people will be affected by such events as

time goes on. As Figure 7 indicates, currently, 1.7 million passengers travel these routes each

year [Murtagh, 2010].

The most recent, well publicized event where airlines were diverted to other routes came

with the powerful January 23, 2012 solar flare and CME. Hailed as the biggest solar storm

since 2003, Delta Airlines chose to divert its flights to more southerly routes, while American

Airlines took no operational action [Waugh, 2012]. Despite the impacts to airline

communications and flight safety, there are no instances where space weather has affected

passengers or airline flight crews, so in some sense, the issue of flight safety and space

weather presents a very modest health risk, but ironically a significant cost in flight time and fuel

to airline companies that choose to apply mitigation.

-----------------------------------------


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2.0 Forecasting Strategies

The specific components of the space weather environment that are known to cause

human impacts are solar x-ray flares, coronal mass ejections, solar proton events, geomagnetic

storms, galactic cosmic rays, electrostatic discharges, and energetic particles in the

magnetosphere. X-ray flares cause ionospheric changes and upper atmosphere heating,

which cause problems for LEO satellites and GPS-based systems. During the impulsive phase

of a CME, shocks also form that lead to the acceleration of particles and solar proton events.

Some of these energetic particles can also arise from the site of the solar flare itself. Solar

proton events and galactic cosmic rays can have energies of 10s of MeV, which lead to SEUs

in computer circuitry, or to enhanced radiation exposure by airline passengers and astronauts (.

The complexity of the space weather environment, and the many ways in which it can

invade our technology to cause problems, almost precludes that we will ever be able to start

from an initial set of solar or geophysical data and use this to determine whether a specific

transformer or satellite system will fail. Consider that a satellite can be rendered inoperable if a

single energetic particle causes a permanent failure of a critical gate, and the vast number of

these particles that pass through a satellite’s volume during its operational lifetime. In quantum

electrodynamics, arguably the most precise physical theory known, precisions of 1 part per 10

billion are routine, but in terms of that fatal energetic particle, we would need a predictive

algorithm of nearly the same caliber, otherwise we are forced to always deal in probabilities.

We also know that, in the space sector with over 2000 operating satellites, it is a rare

event for satellites to actually fail during solar storms. How is it that, in the most recent Galaxy-

15 or Anik-F6 outages, other satellites nearby were not similarly disturbed? We see this curious

paradox again and again in reports of satellite outages related to space weather events. The

industrial response is that satellite failures have much less to do with external space weather

events, which reasonably should have affected more than one satellite simultaneously, than

with manufacturing or software problems internal to the satellite itself such as tin wisker growth

(e.x. Galaxy-7 ca 2000), solar panels designs (e.x. Tempo-2 ca 1997), or software errors (e.x.

Galaxy-15 ca 2010). This raises another important issue that has been a much-discussed topic

among space weather forecasters. How can you predict which space weather events will be

important if the various industries that control the vulnerable assets are not transparent with

their anomaly data?

For most types of space weather events, by the time they are detected it is already too

late to mitigate. This is the case for all of the events that flow from solar or cosmic energetic

particles, or solar X-ray flares. Phenomena such as CMEs, on the other hand, provide us with 1

to 3 days notice of arrival near earth once they are spotted leaving the solar vicinity. To keep

forecasting costs low, what we would like to do is to come up with a small number of

inexpensive measurement indices of the solar and geophysical environment, and through some

TBD algorithm, convert these into a statement about whether a particular resource or asset is in

eminent danger and what the nature of that danger might be so that industry can take action.

We also want to minimize the number of false alarms which can be costly and result in

progressive lack of confidence in the forecasts themselves.

2.1 Solar Storms – flares and CMEs

The simplest correlations we can search for involve solar flares, CMEs, SPEs and the

sunspot cycle, because sunspots can be inexpensively counted and studied with ground-based

instrumentation. We are reasonably certain that solar flares and magnetic reconnection events

require concentrated photospheric magnetic fields, which manifest themselves as sunspots, so

we expect more of these events during times of sunspot maximum than sunspot minimum. Yet

even during sunspot minimum the number of significant flare events is not zero as for example

the M6.4 flare on February 7, 2010, or the X2.6 flare on July 9, 1996. So if you are operating a

GPS system or a WAAS system and require 100% coverage for safety, you will need a back up

plan even during sunspot minimum. What about coronal mass ejections and the effect they can

have on electric power grids?

According to an analysis of 314 halo CMEs during the 23rd cycle by Tripathi and Mishra

(2005), about 3 occurred during sunspot minimum (1996) and 61 during sunspot maximum

(2001), yet fewer than 1 in 6 halo CMEs led to significant geomagnetic storms!


Odenwald (2007) created a combined data base of X-class flares, halo CMEs and Solar

Proton Events (SPE) for the period January-1996 to June-2006, during a time in which

SOHO/LASCO detected 11,031 coronal mass ejections. Of these, 1186 were nominally 'halo'

events including back-side ejections, however, only 598 were actually directed towards Earth.

During the same period of time, 95 solar proton events were recorded by the GOES satellite

network orbiting Earth. Of these SPEs, 61 coincided with Halo CME events. Solar flares were

also recorded by the GOES satellites. During this time period, 21,886 flares were detected, of

which 122 were X-class flares. Of the X-class flares, 96 coincided with Halo CMEs, and 22 X-

class flares also coincided with 22 combined SPE+Halo CME events. There were 6 X-flares

associated with SPEs but not associated with Halo CMEs. A total of 28 SPEs were not

associated with either Halo CMEs or with X-class solar flares. The result can be summarized in

the Venn diagram shown in Figure 8.

What this simple statistical exercise shows is that many of X-class flares (20 of 122),

halo CMEs (458 of 598) and SPEs (28 of 95) are maveric events not associated in general with

the other two types of phenomena. One cannot use halo CMEs to predict if an SPE will result

(only (39+22)/598 = 10 % of the time). One cannot use X-class flares to determine whether an

SPE will result (28/122 = 23% of the time), or using halo CMEs to predict X-class flares, (96/598

= 16% of the time), but if an X-class flare is seen, then you have a (96/122 = ) 79% chance that

a halo CME results, or a (28/95 = ) 29% chance that an SPE results. These statistical results

demonstrate that the path to any sensible form of space weather prediction will probably always

be fraught with the shear uniqueness of each and every space weather event, and the way that

it is then ‘transduced’ by a myriad of technological platforms whose properties and

succeptabilities are often out of the public domain. This is far less like the tornado that rumbles

through a state and wreaks havoc, than a lightning storm whose strike points are utterly random

on the landscape and damage or death is literally a matter of bad luck. This may well be the

situation for global forecasting, but at the individual active region-scale, the situation is

fortunately much more optimistic.

2.2 Reliability of X-class forecasts.

Solar flares and CMEs are the most dramatic precursors of transient changes in space

weather conditions, and considerable effort has been expended in developing predictive

schemes for them (for a review see Forbes, 2010). In all cases, the ability to predict whether a

flare or a CME will occur depends on the quality of the data gathered through the deployment of

sophisticated, and expensive equipment. CMEs cannot be studied without space-based

chronographic equipment (e.g. SOHO/LASCO), sensitive photometers that detect scattered light

from them in transit (STEREO), or in-situ particle and field measurements made at L1 ( e.g.

ACE). There are no ground-based techniques for studying CMEs that could lead to significant

cost savings over using space-based assets that need to be replaced every 10 years or so.

Similarly for solar flares and the solar x-ray emission, only space-based sensors provide the

data required to detect and quantify their severity, with no ground-based analogues to the x-ray

technology. The good news is that both CMEs and x-ray flares produce distinctive ‘Type-II’

bursts of radio-wavelength radiation that ground-based radio telescopes can profitably detect

(e.g. Gopalswamy et al., 2005). By combining ground-based and space-based data over the last

20 years, considerable progress has been made in developing reliable forecasting algorithms

which can provide nearly 100% certainty over the next 24-hour period for significant CME or

flare activity. Most rely on a description of the topology and morphology of sunspots and their

pre-cursor magnetic fields.

Solar flares have been studied extensively since the 1930s since they are historically

known to cause shortwave outages. It has been understood for some time that sunspots with

complex field topologies are prime candidates for flaring activity (Hudson, 2010). Modern-day

analyses that incorporate precursor information about changes in sunspot field topology such

as rotation and shear, and past time history of activity (Nunez et al, 2005), the McIntosh

classification of the sunspot group (Gallagher et al., 2002) lead to forecasts of X-class flares in

the next 24-hour period that are more than 90% reliable with few false-positives. More recently,

Colak and Oahwaji (2007) use a neural network approach to achieve prediction accuracies of

92% for occurrence and 88% for classification (M or X-class). None of these statistical methods

actually employ any physics-based knowledge of the underlying flaring process, but merely

search for correlations among a diverse ensemble of parameters available in various data

bases and archives.

Detailed measurements of the 3-d shape of active region, surface magnetic fields and

their classification (e.g the Wilson classifications), has led to most of the advances in flare

forecasting during the previous sunspot cycle. The legacy of this surface-field approach is best

shown in the research by Steward et al. (2011) who used data from the National Solar

Observatory’s, Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) to investigate strong-gradient polarity

inversion lines, and neutral lines in maps of solar magnetic fields near active regions. By

classifying each active region seen in 2003 according to a 5-parameter scheme (e.g., field

gradient strength, curvature, neutral line length), they statistically compared 44 combinations of

these 5 indices and found an optimal set that maximized the accuracy of predicting a flaring

event. The resulting, optimized algorithm, called FlareCast, can predict a flare with 88%

confidence within a 24-hour period, with a 10% false-positive rate (i.e. 1 prediction out of 10 will

turn out not to occur).

But events transpire so rapidly that, by the time surface fields start to become twisted

into the pre-flare state, it is already too late to prepare Earth-based systems for the resulting

burst of X-rays and energetic particles, which arrive in less than an hour. During the first decade

of the 21st century, a steadily accumulating archive of sub-surface active region images from

the GONG program, has allowed changes in the plasma flows some 65,000 km below the

surface to be studied at a 10-minute cadence, for over 1,000 active regions. In a path-breaking

paper by Reinard et al. (2010), reoccurring sequences of magnetic topology change were

discovered that presaged surface flaring events, with a lead time of 2 to 3 days before the

surface eruption occurred. A vorticity-based index allows active regions to be classified in terms

of its future activity, and can discriminate between regions producing C, M and X-class flares.

The study supports the idea that rotational kinetic energy twists sub-surface fields into unstable

configurations, which are then involved in explosive magnetic reconnection at the surface.

Coronal mass ejections have a shorter history in the space weather community since

their role in the dynamics of the geomagnetic field was only deduced in the 1980s, and actual

space weather effects were not observed until the Quebec Blackout in 1989. X-class flares

have been studied as precursors for CMEs (HaiminWang et al., 2002) as have sigmoidal

features revealed in soft X-ray imaging of the corona (Sterling, 2000; Canfield et al., 1999), and

vector magnetogram studies of the length of the ‘strong-field, strong-shear’ main neutral line in

sunspot groups (Falconer, 2001). Actual predictive schemes remain lacking due to the failure to

bridge the gap between the changes in the small-scale surface fields near measurable active

regions, and the often hidden large-scale magnetic field rearrangements that occur before the

CME is launched.

Once evidence is available for a CME launch, the arrival time at Earth and the

geoeffectivness become important predictive issues. Some progress has been made in this

area. It has been known for several decades that the most efficient energy transfer into the

geomagnetic field occurs for ‘south directed’ CME field orientations. This can currently only be

determined by in situ measurements made by satellites at L1 such as ACE. Also, the speed of

the CME and the quantity of entrained plasma determine the ram pressure of the arriving CME

at the magnetosphere boundary. The effect of aerodynamic drag by the interplanetary medium

has also been studied (Song, 2010), and the results provide significantly improved

determinations of the initial CME speed, its speed at 1 AU, and the transit time. The advent of

STEREO spacecraft imaging of CMEs at large angles from the sun-earth axis have verified the

deceleration of fast-moving CMEs in the interplanetary medium, and that CMEs need to be

tracked at least 30 degrees from the sun in order to obtain arrival time accuracies less than

about 6 hours.

Solar proton events, often associated with shock acceleration in the initial stages of CME

ejection, have also entered the domain of forecasting through the same statistical studies that

proved successful with X-ray forecasting. For instance, Chin (2005) used an archive of 28 SPE

between 1997-2000 and compared these events with solar radio bursts recorded between 245

MHz and 15,400 MHz to find a strong correlation between Type-III radio bursts at 245 MHz and

the appearance of an SPE observed some 1-2 days later.

2.3 The current solar cycle – and beyond.

It is an elementary exercise to follow the general trending of the last 23 sunspot cycles

and predict that the current one will have a roughly-11 year period, followed no doubt by, Cycle

25, 26, etc into the future. Of course we have historical evidence from the Maunder Minimum

that, on occasion, the 11-year cycle seems to vanish entirely. A diminished solar activity cycle

means that there are proportionately fewer CMEs, flares and SPEs to worry about, and so one

expects a significantly lower risk of GICs in the electric power grid, satellite anomalies and a

lowered risk for excessive radiation exposure for astronauts. Since the flux of cosmic rays is

anti-correlated with the solar activity cycle, this still means that we will experience enhanced

cosmic rays fluxes.

In 2006, a number of prediction schemes were exercised in order to forecast what Cycle

24 might be like, but it was soon recognized from the steady pile up of ‘spotless days’ that Cycle

24 would be qualitatively different than any cycle since ca 1906. There was even some

speculation that a new Maunder Minimum might be at hand. A survey by Pesnell (2008) shows

that there were over 50 predictions for the peak year and SSN for Cycle 24 using many

different, and often independent approaches, both statistics-based and physics-based (see

Charbonneau, 2010). The earliest ‘physics –based’ predictions have suggested that Cycle 24

might be as severe as Cycle 23, and perhaps even worse than any cycle in the last 400 years.

This turned out not to be in line with the trends that began to materialize by ca 2010 and now

estimates have been revised downwards to a peak near 60 and a peak time during the second-

half of 2013.

Recent studies using the GONG network had not detected the sun’s torsional oscillation,

which usually is an advanced indicator of east-west, subsurface plasma flows, and that have

been identified as the harbingers of sunspot formation in the next cycle. Before Cycle 24 had

begun, these same torsional oscillations had been detected and correctly predicted the late-

arrival of the onset of Cycle 24. The concern is that the start of Cycle 25 may be significantly

delayed to ca 2022, or possibly not occur at all [Penn and Livingston, 2006; Hill, 2011].

3.0 Modeling the Economic and Societal Impacts.

Compared to terrestrial weather, space weather as we have experienced it during the

Space Age, is in the ‘noise’ in terms of economic impact. The difference between 1 or 2

extreme weather events in 2011, out of the 37 recorded world-wide, is about $2 billion. This

equals the economic impact of ALL the commercial satellites lost in the entire 11-year solar

cycle ending 2006!

Cycle 23 will be seen by historians, no doubt, as a watershed moment in space weather

history. Prior to Cycle 23, there was little or no public discussion about space weather

vulnerability during the Space Age, although our grandparents surely knew all about the

practical consequences of space weather and the insufferable short wave outages. With Cycle

23, we had SOHO providing the public with dazzling and ominous movies of solar storms, and

many popularizers, including myself, who went on the stump to sort out for the public all the

ways in which we could be affected. Then, just before the famous Halloween Storm of 2003, we

had the first high-profile Congressional hearing about space weather in the context of why

NOAAs Space Environment Center (SEC) budget should not be halved. Once Homeland

Security became involved, we then had a new round of hearings about our infrastructure

vulnerability to space weather events. The Space Weather Forum was held in Washington, DC

on Capitol Hill in June 2008 to educate Capitol Hill about space weather issues. Meanwhile,

researchers began the difficult task of trying to quantify what these impacts could cost us and

the social disruption that might follow.

Kappenmann (1997) has an extensive record of modeling the US power grid with increasingly

more sophisticated models of the electrodynamics of GICs and exhaustive studies of the North

American electric grid network at the component level. Currently, his efforts use historical

geomagnetic storms (e.g. 1921 event) and their impact on the contemporary electric power grid.

Among the forecasts are for year-long recovery periods costing over $1 trillion in GDP.

Teisberg and Weiher (2000) estimated that the economic benefits of providing reliable warnings

of geomagnetic storms to the electric power industry (alone) would be approximately $450

million over three years (note that this doesn't include any other impacted industries). This is

well above the $100 million cost of a new operational satellite that would provide such warnings

(ACE, Triana)

Odenwald and Green (2007) modeled the economic losses to commercial satellites in LEO,

MEO and GEO orbits and deduced that an 1859-scale ‘superstorm’ arriving near sunspot

maximum could cost $50 billion in lost revenue and assets.

August 1988, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the NRC published ‘Evaluation of the

Reliability for the Offsite Power Supply as a Contributor to the Risk of Nuclear Plants’. This set

the stage for considering the impact of space weather-related GICs on the reliability and safety

of nuclear power plants (Kirby et al., 1988).

April 1989, Northwest Power Coordinating Council (NPCC) approved the document

"Procedures for Solar Magnetic Disturbances Which Affect Electric Power Systems" which has

been updated several time.(NPCC, 1989)

October 2003 – ‘What is Space weather and who should forecast it? Congressional Hearing on

Space Weather held before the Subcommittee on Environment, Technology, and Standards,

Committee on Science, House of Representatives, One Hundred Eighth Congress, first session,

October 30, 2003, (Congress, 2003)

December 2005, Idaho National Laboratory and NRC published ‘Reevaluation of Station

Blackout Risk at Nuclear Power Plants--Analysis of Station Blackout Risk.’ The executive

summary from this report reads in part: The availability of alternating current (ac) power is

essential for safe operations and accident recovery at commercial nuclear power plants. (INL,

2005)

April, 2008: "Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from

Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack: Critical Infrastructures". The US Congress funded a

vulnerability assessment research under the National Defense Authorization Act to evaluate the

impact of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a high altitude nuclear detonation by a terrorist

event on the nation's critical infrastructure including the electric grid. The same study also

discussed geomagnetically-induced currents. (EMP Commission, 2008)

2008 ‘Severe Space Weather Events—Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts

Workshop Report’. The National Academy of Sciences determined that severe geomagnetic

storms have the potential to cause long-duration outages to widespread areas of the North

American grid. (NAS, 2008)

June 2010, "High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power

System," jointly sponsored by NERC and the Department of Energy, NERC now concedes that

the North American power grids have significant reliability issues in regard to High-Impact, Low-

Frequency events such as severe space weather. The NERC report explains commercial grid

vulnerability to space weather (NERC, 2010)

October 2010, ‘Electromagnetic Pulse: Effects on the U.S. Power Grid’, Oak Ridge National

Laboratory released a series of comprehensive technical reports for the Federal Energy

Regulatory Commission (FERC) in joint sponsorship with the Department of Energy and the

Department of Homeland Security. These reports disclose that the commercial power grids in

two large areas of the continental United States are vulnerable to severe space weather. The

reports conclude that solar activity and resulting large earthbound CME, occurring on average

once every one hundred years, would induce a geomagnetic disturbance and cause probable

collapse of the commercial grid in these vulnerable areas. The replacement lead time for extra

high voltage transformers is approximately 1-2 years. As a result, about two-thirds of nuclear

power plants and their associated spent fuel pools would likely be without commercial grid

power for a period of 1-2 years. (Oak Ridge Labs, 2010)

Armed with all this bad news, and with the storms of Cycle 24 now beginning, it has

become commonplace for Reporters to quote these studies and offer titles such as ‘A big solar

storm could cost $2 trillion, could be a global Katrina’ or ‘Solar storm buffets Earth: How

protected is the US power grid?’. The danger is that, through constant repetition of this

Doomsday theme, the public will become inured to the message in the face of the inevitable

false alarms such as the January 2012 storm. While it is certainly important to keep the

preparation message alive given the consequences to our infrastructure, as scientists and

space weather forecasters, we need to be more careful with delivering this complex message to

a Public increasingly eager for a binary answer to their safety.

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Figures and Figure Captions

Figure 1 – The number of short wave stations (vertical axis) has dropped dramatically since the advent of the World Wide Web and other wireless media, which now provide the main source of news reporting in the 21st century. (Data courtesy Careless, 2010)

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Figure 2 – A small portion of a map of the current locations of submarine fiber optic cables ca 2011. (Courtesy TeleGeography,2012)

Figure 3 – This figure shows the effects of high-energy solar protons on an exposed imager on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory during the January 23, 2012 solar storm. A greatly reduced flux of particles entering shielded satellite circuitry results in SEUs, many of which are harmless, but a few per year can result in serious operational anomalies.

Figure 4 - A new report from the International Telecommunications Union finds that at the end of 2009, 67 percent of all people on Earth were cell phone subscribers (solid line). The number of land line subscribers is now in decline (dotted line) having reached a maximum of 19% of world inhabitants in 2005 (Duncan, 2010).

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Figure 5 – Total electron content (TEC) calculation for April 20, 2012 for 19:00 UT developed by JPL.

Figure 6‐ GICs cause damage to large transformers through magnetostriction and the resulting thermal heating. This picture is reminiscent of the images of transformers that failed during the 1989 Quebec Blackout (Courtesy Murtagh, 2009)

Figure 7 – The number of passengers flying ‘polar routes’ continues to sharply increase each year to a current level of nearly 1.7 million passengers each year [Murtagh, 2010].

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Figure 8 – A simple Venn diagram showing the frequency of Halo CMEs, X-class flares and Solar Proton Events during Cycle 23. There were a total of 598 Earth-directed CMEs, 95 Solar Proton Events, and 122 X-class flares. It is clear from the intersection statistics that the vast majority of CMEs do not result in SPEs, or are associated with X-class flare events. However, it is also true that the majority of X-class flares are associated with CMEs, and that the majority of SPEs are associated with CMEs as well.

Documents

Space Weather Impacts, Mitigation and Forecasting · ever reaches the level of urgency of even an approaching, severe thunderstorm. Despite the fact that, since the 1990s, we have